News

MPV player, a fork of MPlayer, wants to relicense
the code it uses from MPlayer as LGPL. If you are an MPlayer developer and have
not yet given permission, please visit MPV's bug
https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/2033.
Or please contact me and I can get you in contact directly with wm4.

If you know of any updated MPlayer builds or GUI forks for Mac OSX, please let me know.
MPlayer OSX and MPlayer OSX Extended both seem to be abandoned. I recommend
Mac OSX users to use command line MPlayer, VLC
or mpv for osx

MPlayer 1.3.0 is compatible with the FFmpeg 3.0.x releases and (at the time of
writing) with FFmpeg git.
The tarball already includes a copy of FFmpeg 3.0, so you don't need to fetch
it separately.

This release brings you some new codecs and formats, a lot of fixes, and many
cleanups. It also includes all the enhancements and speed-ups from FFmpeg;
check their changelog if you are curious about the details.

In addition to these, there were a lot of updates to accommodate the API
changes made in FFmpeg. Some were simple renames, but others were quite
invasive. None of them should have a user-visible effect, except maybe for
some corner-cases in the channel order for multichannel files.
If you see any regression from the previous releases, please report it on the
mplayer-users mailing list or use our
bug tracker.

So, which version should you use? Try this simple test.

1 Do you compile your own MPlayer?

If no, go to 5.

2 Do you want to use a system-wide copy of FFmpeg?

If no, go to 4.

3 Which version of FFmpeg do you have?

If it's 2.8.x, use MPlayer 1.2.x

If it's 3.0.x, use MPlayer 1.3.x

If you have an older version, you are on your own. Sorry

If you have a newer version, can I borrow your time machine?

4 Do you want the latest and greatest features?

If yes, use MPlayer SVN and FFmpeg git.

If no (why?), use 1.3.x unless you have a good reason to stay on 1.2.x.

MPlayer 1.2.1 is a bugfix release from the 1.2 branch. If you're using MPlayer
1.2 you are encouraged to upgrade.

MPlayer 1.2.1 fixes many crashes with fuzzed files, squashes many bugs and
includes some compatibility enhancements. A lot of bugs are fixed also in
FFmpeg, you can check their changelog for details.
It's also easier to build this release with a system-wide version of FFmpeg,
since you don't need to copy internal FFmpeg headers anymore.

Mplayer 1.2.1 is compatible with the FFmpeg 2.8.x releases.
The tarball includes a copy of FFmpeg 2.8.5 (the latest at this date), so you
don't need to fetch it separately.
Just like 1.2, this version will not work with current FFmpeg master branch,
nor with the upcoming FFmpeg 2.9 (or 3.0, or whatever name will be chosen).
If you need to work with the latest FFmpeg, please use svn version.

If you're following the development from svn HEAD you can ignore this; all the
bug fixes are also included in the development version.

Mplayer 1.2 is compatible with the recent FFmpeg 2.8 release.
The tarball already includes a copy of FFmpeg, so you don't need to fetch it
separately.
Due to some big API changes coming to FFmpeg, this release will not work with
new FFmpeg master branch, nor with future FFmpeg releases.

If you want to follow the latest improvements in MPlayer and FFmpeg, you are
strongly encouraged to use Subversion HEAD and benefit from the latest
features and bug fixes.
You know how to do it. Because you aren't using a 3 years old release,
hopefully. If you are, read on and find out what you missed!

VDPAU hardware accelerated decoding now works for HEVC (if your card and
driver supports it).
Hardware accelerated decoding is now supported also on Os X via VDA.
VAAPI is still unsupported, but you can use it via VDPAU wrapper at least for
H.264.

A lot of new codecs, thanks to FFmpeg. The list includes HEVC, VP9 and Prores;
Opus, improved AAC and DTS decoders; WebP and JPEG2000; and many, many others.
Also rtsp streaming now uses FFmpeg by default, so you don't need any
additional library to use it.
For the full list of improvements and bugfixes check the FFmpeg Changelog
(note: not all features are available through MPlayer at the moment,
especially filters).

Many GUI improvements, both in functionality (eg. TV and DVB support) and
appearance.
If you use the GUI, be sure to grab also the latest version of your favorite
skin, or try a new one. You can get them
here.
The GUI now officially needs version 2 of GTK+ and GLib (compilation with older
version was already broken for quite some time).

Starting from this release, MPlayer no longer ships with an internal copy of
libdvdnav and libdvdcss. You can use the libraries provided with your
distribution, or compile and install them yourself. They will be autodetect
at configuration time.
If your distribution does not include libdvdcss you can usually grab it from
non-official repositories, or you can dowload the latest source code form its
homepage.

The tarballs are compressed with xz, for compatibility with odd systems they
are available also with gzip compression.
Please get the xz variant if you can to save bandwidth.

A long awaited feature in MPlayer has arrived! Well, its still not possible in MPlayer to play two
subtitles at once. Maybe when -vf lavfi gets fixed up, then it might be possible to chain filters.
However there is now an open source project to merge two subtitle files together.

More information and the srt subtitle merging program for Linux, Windows and Mac can be found at
DualSub.

The server on which FFmpeg and MPlayer Trac issue trackers were
installed was compromised. The affected server was taken offline
and has been replaced and all software reinstalled.

MPlayer SVN, releases, web and mailinglists are on other servers and
were not affected. We believe that the original compromise happened
to a server, unrelated to FFmpeg and MPlayer, several months ago.
That server was used as a source to clone the VM that we recently moved
Trac to. It is not known if anyone used the backdoor that was found.

We recommend all users to change their passwords.
Especially users who use a password on Trac that they also use elsewhere,
should change that password at least elsewhere.

It looks like Doom9 forums were compromised.
Running a packet sniffer while accessing the site brings up urls:
http://online-multiplayer.com/doom9/l.js
http://online-multiplayer.com/doom9/data.php
Make sure you change your password if you've logged in recently.

For those of you sticking to the release version, we recommend to update to
1.1.1 to avoid security issues.
The tar file in the download section also contains the latest version of the
FFmpeg 0.11 release with many fixes of its own.

If you need a diff of only the fix itself, for example for old versions you still
want or need to maintain please use

We would like to get MPlayer-VAAPI merged and need some developers to review and fix
up the codebase. Advanced help would be appreciated, please coordinate on mplayer-dev-eng
mailing list for more information.

After a long pause, we decided that it might be a good idea to make
a new release. While we had our fun with the naming scheme with lots
of "pre" and "rc" it seemed time to move on and with everyone incrementing
major versions between weekly and monthly we hope to be forgiven for
jumping ahead to 1.1.

This release is intended to be compatible with the recent FFmpeg 0.11 release.
We hope it will be useful to distros and other users relying on FFmpeg 0.11.
Everyone else is encouraged to follow Subversion HEAD to always get the latest
features and bug fixes. You might still want to read the release announcement to
get a short summary of any bigger changes and improvements.

Among the bigger news is that we found a maintainer for the X11 gmplayer GUI,
so those holding out on it against our earlier recommendations will get a lot
of bug fixes.

There is also support for more subtitle types (Bluray, DVB, DVB closed-caption
for example), many improvements to -vo gl including output of 10 bit video,
very basic but usable OpenGL ES support and much better SDL support which
makes it a usable choice on OSX (particularly on older PowerPC variants much
faster than corevideo or quartz).
MPlayer will now also try much harder to handle intermittent network failures,
for example trying to reconnect.

As part of the code cleanup efforts, the internal libfaad2 copy has been removed
since the FFmpeg decoder is working well. Also the internal mp3lib copy is no
longer used by default since the many alternatives (FFmpeg, libmpg123, libmad)
avoid its recurring issues like incorrect decoding with newer compilers.
However it can still be forced at runtime for easier tracking of regressions.
Please do not rely on this since it will be removed in the future.
If you do not actually need it consider disabling it at compile time with --disable-mp3lib.

As a first for this release, the tarballs are available in two variants:
compressed with xz and compressed with gzip.
Please get the xz variant if you can to save bandwidth, the gzip version
is for everyone that cannot use it.
Should you never have encountered xz compressed files, newer versions of
tar can uncompress it via "tar xJf MPlayer-1.1.tar.xz".

MPlayer does support encrypted BluRay playback, though not all steps
are handled by MPlayer itself. The two alternative methods use the
URL schemes bd:// (always supports decryption, but you need the key for each
and every disk in ~/.dvdcss/KEYDB.cfg and only works well with very simple
BluRays, similar to dvd:// vs. dvdnav://) and br:// (uses libbluray and
should support the same as VideoLAN in the link below but that is untested).

Thanks to FFmpeg and its project in the Google Summer of Code program, we
now have multi threaded support for playing back H.264 and other codecs.
To enable threading run mplayer -lavdopts threads=N file.mkv
where N is the number of threads you want to use.

You will need to have the latest SVN MPlayer for this. Please report any bugs
you find to our Bug Trac.

MPlayer 1.0rc4 continues the tradition of long overdue, but better late
than never releases. It has been tested thoroughly to work with the FFmpeg
0.6 branch. It will be useful to distros and other users relying on FFmpeg
0.6. To get the latest and greatest in features and bug fixes, Subversion
HEAD should be a better fit.

1.0rc4 once again adds a slew of new binary codecs and leverages all the
stuff added to FFmpeg. Notable additions are VP8 decoding, H.264 bug fixes
and speedups, unencrypted Blu-ray support. Network streams can now be played
through FFmpeg, there has been quite a bit of subtitle work and Ogg and
Matroska demuxer defaults were switched to libavformat. The window position
is now decided by the window manager.

Our constant efforts to clean up the codebase continue as usual. A ton
of compiler warnings disappeared and there have been refactorings all
around. External library copies have been synchronized with upstream.
The internal liba52 copy is gone and it is now possible to build against
external libmpeg2 and libmpg123.

As a special service for Ubuntu users, the mplayer project now provides
packages for various versions of Ubuntu. The packages are built twice a
week from SVN trunk and run independently of your system libraries.

I want to thank you all for the contributions, patches, bugs, docs, testing etc.
Especially Michael Niedermayer, Fabrice Bellard and Nick Kurshev,
who made it to be the best & fastest open-source player!

And sorry Nick, I made a big mistake rejecting your multi-threaded patches.
Unfortunatelly your idea came too early, nobody (at least me) thought that
desktop PCs will ever have multiple CPUs... and now that even cheap notebooks
and netbooks have multi-core CPUs, it would be very useful for HD playback...

Also special thanks to Gabucino, Pontscho and LGB, for your support in the
early days, when everybody thought i'm mad, working on video player for linux...

Some work is being done to the MPEG subtitle code, but we need more samples of
DVB and VBI-coded teletext as well as other MPEG-TS/PS subtitles which currently
do not work in SVN or which work with -demuxer lavf but not with MPlayer's demuxer.

1.0rc3 was intended to be rolled out over a year ago, but got delayed
again and again. Since it is designed to be compatible with the FFmpeg
0.5 branch, it will be useful to distros and other users still
tracking said branch. Thus we are now publishing it even though it is
outdated even before the day of its release. For general usage current
Subversion snapshots should be a better fit, as many bug fixes and new
features are available.

This release adds support for a ton of new binary codecs and leverages all
the stuff added to FFmpeg. Hardware-accelerated video output over VDPAU is
now possible, as is audio output through PulseAudio.
MPlayer now runs natively on 64bit OS X, the Wii and on OS/2.

We have switched to the libavformat MOV/MP4 demuxer to avoid maintaining the
duplicate MOV/MP4 code. This breaks binary audio/video codecs with MOV/MP4
files. Please use '-demuxer mov' if you still require the binary decoders.

Our constant efforts to clean up the codebase continue as usual. A ton of
compiler warnings disappeared and there have been refactorings all around.
External library copies have been synchronized with upstream.

There is no need to download binary codec packages if you already have an
older version. The codec packs have not been updated.

Note that this code is ancient, e.g. it still contains
this
long-fixed bug.
Unless you are at least deadly allergic to it, use latest SVN instead.

There are several ways to speed up the playback of 1080 H.264 files in MPlayer.

First is to use the newly added VDPAU
output. It allows the newer
Nvidia video cards
to decode the video without using much CPU. It is in SVN MPlayer
(Nvidia binary driver 180.37 or newer required), you can
find known bugs and report bugs
HERE.
(Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD only)
How to get the SVN version is described on the download page
and snapshot tarballs are available as well.

Second is to use MPlayer with the experimental multithreaded
FFmpeg-mt
branch, which allows you to use multiple cores/CPU. (all OS and CPU supported)
To enable threading run mplayer -lavdopts threads=N file.mkv
where N is the number of threads you want to use.
NOTE: FFmpeg-mt has problems with packed b-frames.

Third is to use the multithreaded CoreAVC
codec with the CoreAVC-for-linux
project. The CoreAVC decoder costs $15 USD. (Linux ONLY)(Windows users only need
this PATCH)

Fourth, FFmpeg has added some optimizations
from the x264 project.
To fully utilize these you will need to make sure a recent version of YASM
is installed and detected by the latest SVN MPlayer when compiling.

Fifth, using -lavdopts skiploopfilter=all:fast=1 may cause artifacts, but will allow
you to play larger files in realtime. (all OS and CPU supported)
(use -lavdopts skipframe=nonref:skiploopfilter=all:fast=1 for even more speedup,
skipframe also works with VDPAU.)

There is also a rejected
PATCH
which adds support for the new multithreaded binary VC-1/WMV3 codec.